Huawei is a very interesting company. They're heavily subsidized by the Chinese government. There's been a lot of controversy surrounding their products in terms of intellectual property infringement and military ties.

And then they go and unveil this thing, the Huawei Vision - and, as the title says, it bears a striking resemblance (from the front, at least) to a certain other phone:

Take a look at the top tier of Android phones right now and you might notice something. They all kind of look the same. Black front fascia, large touchscreen, minimal waistline. Boring, right? Well that's just the way things are going. Alternatives to the slate way of living are becoming increasingly rare, which puts the HTC Desire Z with its hardware keyboard in an intriguing light. With its metallic accents and suave grey pallet, the Desire Z cuts a different path.

Who says the G2's processor is slow, eh? While its stock 800 MHz clockspeed didn't break any benchmark records, it's showing itself to be nicely capable of overclocking. Unlike the QSD8250 in the original Snapdragon, which gets rather unstable anywhere past the 1.13GHz (+15%) mark, the MSM7230 in the Scorpion of the G2 sails right on past +100% with apparent stability. The kernel was posted on XDA-Developers by member Flippy125, with the usual "NOT MY FAULT IF-" disclaimers, but also noting that the kernel runs stably for him.

You're probably aware of one of the slightly more irksome facets of the G2 that is stymying attempts at custom ROMs, namely the locked down /system partition, where the OS is kept. Heretofore it has been impossible to tinker with this internal memory in a permanent fashion. All alterations were reverted on the next boot, leading to solutions like Paul O'Brien's VISIONary soft-root.

Well, Mr. O'Brien isn't the kind of fellow you can restrain with NAND lockdowns, and with a flourish today he unveiled his latest hack.

With the G2 already getting a non-persistent "soft-root" solution, it was only a matter of time before someone combined it into a nice, user-friendly package. Stepping up to the plate (or rather, the crease) is Paul O'Brien, the founder of UK smartphone website MoDaCo, well known for a myriad of clever hacks.

Superusers, you can haz them

Deriving its name from the HTC Vision device codename, VISIONary is a simple one-click temporary root app for the T-Mobile G2.

Seems like the HTC phones are really taking up the lions share of Android news lately, doesn't it? First the G2 was rooted, and shortly after we learned that HTC did its best to prevent perma-rooting. And just this morning, we heard word that the Desire HD and Z are both being delayed. Quite a mouthful, we know - but now that you're up to speed: an enterprising individual by the name of kholk over at XDA-Devs has come up with a root method for the HTC Desire Z.

Over at XDA-Developers, Hitorii just got his sweet new T-Mobile G2. Naturally, before even opening the box, he went and told everyone about it. Wouldn't you? I am super jealous, anyway.

He also made a neat new discovery that we had not heard of before: the trackpad has an LED surround, which glows white on new notifications. He wasn't able to get it to glow any other colour, even using apps that do have coloured notifications, so it looks like the LED is not the same as the RGB light of the Nexus One.

While the teaser site for the T-Mobile G2 has been up for quite some time now, HTC, the company actually manufacturing the device, have been quite reticent about its specifications and what’s driving that stock Froyo goodness. Of course, we’ve known of its MSM7230 and various other details for a couple of weeks, but it’s nice to see the official specs solidified on HTC’s website. There are no surprises contained within, but something about the confirmation of what was once nebulous rumour can’t help but bring a warming pulse to every Android’s circuitry.

It’s not uncommon to see the big chains try to get a piece of the smartphone launch action with price reductions by mail-in-rebate. However, the hassle that this process usually entails doesn’t make things all that enticing to customers. Thankfully pre-orders for the G2 aren’t yet open on T-Mobile’s website, so prospective buyers now have the pleasure in knowing they’ll be able to get in instant discount with RadioShack, bringing the price down to $149.99 on a two year contract.